Wherefore art thou, dear zooplankton?

June 6, 2014
by Angela Herring

Amanda Dwyer is a graduate student at Northeastern’s Marine Science Center and she will be leading a research project for Mission 31, a monthlong underwater expedition led by Fabien Cousteau. Credit: Mariah Tauger.

On a good day, corals make happy homes for photosynthetic algae. It's a cooperative setup, with the algae turning dissolved carbon dioxide into food for the coral and the coral providing a nice roof for the algae.

But due to warming temperatures and ocean acidification, good days are becoming fewer and farther between. More and more, algae are evacuating their coral homes, leaving the corals hungry and susceptible to disease. The phenomenon is called coral bleaching because the algae also do their part to paint the marine invertebrates' bodies the beautiful colors we're familiar with—when there's no one home, the corals turn white.

One way that corals are thought to weather this climate change storm is by increasing their diet of zooplankton, the microscopic animals dispersed throughout the water column. "However, too little is known about zooplankton dynamics specifically on coral reefs to know if this is a sustainable solution for coral recovery from bleaching," said Amanda Dwyer, a graduate student in professor Mark Patterson's lab at Northeastern's Marine Science Center in Nahant, Massachusetts.

To get a better sense of zooplankton's behaviors and habits, Dwyer will be spearheading one of four Northeastern-led scientific projects during Mission 31, a monthlong underwater research expedition currently underway and led by Fabien Cousteau, grandson of the legendary ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau.

"This is a very cool opportunity to have one whole lunar cycle of data looking at the zooplankton," Dwyer said. "The tides are based on the moon and so the lunar cycle really has a lot to do with ocean movement and ocean patterns."

With a whole month of data, Dwyer and her colleagues will provide a foundation on which others will be able to examine important questions about zooplankton dynamics, including how they move both within and between reefs.

For this particular project, she and the four Mission 31 aquanauts—who will be based full-time at the underwater research station Aquarius for the duration of the expedition—will be collecting two types of data. First, they'll be looking at migration of zooplankton during the night from the bottom of the ocean floor to the sea surface. Second, they will trawl the water during the day at four points along the water column: at about one-half meter down, one meter down, and two meters down, as well as at the surface.

They'll then take these samples back to the lab where they'll be able to figure out where in the water different species reside at different points during the day.

"Normally zooplankton migrate up to the surface of the water at night when there's no light because that helps them avoid predation from fish and it's where their main food source, phytoplankton, is most abundant," Dwyer said. "And then they go back down to the bottom during the day, which is a safer environment for them."

While zooplankton dynamics may vary across different reefs due to site-specific conditions, this 31-day snapshot will provide a general baseline to begin comparing zooplankton availability with other stressed and unstressed reefs, Dwyer said. This would allow researchers to make predictions about a reef's potential for success.

Related Stories

Nine miles off the coast of Key Largo, Fla., and 63 feet beneath the waves lies the world's only underwater research lab: Aquarius. "There's no place like it on earth," said Mark Patterson, professor of marine and environmental ...

New research by University of Georgia ecologists sheds light on exactly what happens to coral during periods of excessively high water temperatures. Their study, published in the journal Limnology and Oceanography, documents ...

(Phys.org) —Coral reefs are under threat from rising sea temperatures caused by global warming. But in a recent paper, published in Science, it was found that certain types of coral are able to adapt to tolerate higher ...

It is estimated that ocean temperature warming will cause phytoplankton and zooplankton biomass to decrease by 6 percent and 11 percent respectively by the end of the century. A lower amount of these two main elements in ...

A giant barrel sponge living in the backyard of the underwater research vessel Aquarius may be one of the planet's oldest living creatures. Topping more than 2,000 years of age, these marine organisms filter large quantities ...

The grandson of famed French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau began a potentially record-breaking 31-day underwater stint off the US coast Sunday, with his mission declaring "splashdown!!!" as the expedition got underway.

Recommended for you

Five million years ago, the Colorado River met the Gulf of California near the present-day desert town of Blythe, California. The evidence, say University of Oregon geologists, is in the sedimentary rocks exposed at the edges ...

Pressure, temperature and fluid composition play an important role in the amount of metals and other chemicals found in wastewaters from hydraulically fractured gas reservoirs, according to Penn State researchers.

Pioneering work being carried out in a cave in New Mexico by researchers at McMaster University and The University of Akron, Ohio, is changing the understanding of how antibiotic resistance may have emerged and how doctors ...

(Phys.org)—A team of researchers with the European Commission's Joint Research Centre and Google Switzerland has combined historical data with modern mapping engines to produce high-resolution maps of the world's surface ...

The ice sheet covering Greenland is four times bigger than California—and holds enough water to raise global sea-level more than twenty feet if most of it were to melt. Today, sea levels are rising and the melting of Greenland ...

0 comments

Please sign in to add a comment.
Registration is free, and takes less than a minute.
Read more

Click here to reset your password.
Sign in to get notified via email when new comments are made.